Data breach hits 1,100 city residents

The emails of about 1,100 Hamilton residents were accessed without authorization in a data breach of a municipal program, the city says.

Municipal Media Inc, which operates Recycle Coach & My Waste, told Hamilton city staff and those of several other municipalities about the breach earlier this week.

All of the 1,100 affected users have been contacted, the city said in a news release Friday evening.

“At this time, it appears that only email addresses were accessed by the unauthorized party. No other information such as name, location or passwords were impacted.”

Those who registered for the program that notifies residents of garbage, recycling and yardwaste collection schedules and related information provided email addresses to sign up.

“The city is actively investigating how this breach happened and we are working with the operators of Recycle Coach and My Waste to ensure it does not happen again,” the city said in the news release.

On Monday evening, the Toronto-based company that owns My Waste discovered an account it had set up with an outside emailing service called MailChimp was hacked.

The MailChimp account was created by Municipal Media in December to notify 55,000 subscribers, via email, that they could now get waste collection information through the Amazon Echo and Google Home devices.

Municipal Media, which offers the app to 3,000 municipalities worldwide, revealed the data breach on Tuesday. All app subscribers were notified this week by both the company and regional authorities.

“We're sorry this happened,” said Creighton Hooper, company president, adding the company has discovered its password procedures for using technology not owned by them had to be more robust.

“Our internal security processes are very strong but we didn't extend those to this outside service we were using for marketing purposes and that's since been corrected.”